Tween On The Screen

By JONATHAN DEE

Published: April 8, 2007

Six or eight hip, pretty, very nervous-looking girls -- somewhere around 14 years of age, though it's possible they only look that old -- were perched on couches in the splashy lobby of Nickelodeon's New York production offices, high above Times Square. The girls were there to audition, but they weren't holding scripts, because they were not auditioning for anything in particular. ''We're seeing kids all the time,'' Paula Kaplan, senior vice president of talent at Nickelodeon, told me. ''Even when we don't have a show to cast. We're meeting kids on a regular basis, just bringing them in, just to see who they are.''

It might not have blunted their nervousness to know that on that day last November there was in fact a new show in the early stages of development just beyond those lobby doors -- not an animated show either, but a live-action sitcom -- though ''early stages'' may be an overstatement. Nick's next big sitcom had only one or two actors cast, no writing staff, no title, no pilot episode -- not even a script for a pilot episode. Not even an outline of one. In spite of which, Nick's head of development and original programming, Marjorie Cohn, told me, the network had already committed not only to producing 13 episodes of this hypothetical show but also to begin broadcasting those episodes in the fall of 2007.

At first I thought I must have heard this wrong. Thirteen episodes of a concept? Nickelodeon is part of Viacom, after all, and Viacom does not do business in this improvisatory fashion. Not to mention that the success of the Disney Channel was making Nick's demographic more of a battleground than ever. Where were the poll results, the Q ratings, the meetings full of midlevel executives? How was it possible that a network that has led its particular niche of the entertainment industry for the last 12 years -- the highest-rated network on cable TV, period -- could have already scheduled a season's worth of a show that no one there seemed to know the first thing about?

When I put the question to Cohn, she turned to look at an associate, and together they shrugged, unperturbed. Then she looked back at me and said simply, ''It's Dan.''

''Dan'' is Dan Schneider, creator of three of Nick's most successful series, ''Drake & Josh,'' ''Zoey 101'' and ''The Amanda Show.'' He has kick-started the careers of adolescent stars like Amanda Bynes, Kenan Thompson, Drake Bell and now Miranda Cosgrove, known to legions of preteens for her roles in ''Drake & Josh'' and the movie ''School of Rock'' and positioned to make her debut next fall as the star of Schneider's new show. His career as a kind of Aaron Sorkin of tween sitcoms is lent a certain psychological piquancy by the fact that he was once a famous teen actor himself; at 41, he is still recognizable to TV viewers of a certain age as Dennis Blunden, the wisecracking brainiac from the '80s sitcom ''Head of the Class.''

The autonomy Schneider enjoys says a lot about TV for tweens, an economically fertile territory that manages for the most part to operate under the cultural radar. All kinds of science and pseudoscience attach themselves to discussions of TV shows for very young children -- its deleterious effects on the toddler brain and whatnot -- but by the time those kids reach 7 or 8, educators, TV programmers and to some extent parents themselves have stopped paying much attention to that stuff. Children go from being a kind of cultural protectorate to the Junior Auxiliary of the tube-watching nation at large, and programs are designed for them on the same principle as they're designed for grown-ups: as a way to sell eyeballs to advertisers. Nickelodeon made $800 million on that sale last year, and that doesn't even include the various merchandising streams -- the DVDs, the magazines, the toys, the theme hotel, etc. Even so, the fact that they are lately taking a ratings beating from Disney tween-coms like ''The Suite Life of Zack and Cody'' and ''Hannah Montana'' has to be setting off some internal alarms.

The effort by Viacom and Disney and others to colonize youngsters' attention boils down to a bunch of adults trying to figure out what kids will like -- a question that stays refreshingly elusive, even when the adults have M.B.A.'s. There's an element of magic to it; and so when you find a grown-up like Schneider with the requisite mojo, you pretty much let him do whatever he wants.

By mid-January, with the pilot scheduled to be taped in two weeks, Schneider's new show was starting to seem a little more real: it had acquired about three-quarters of a cast and a title -- ''iCarly,'' as in ''iPod'' or ''I, Claudius.'' He had yet to write a script for this half-hour of television, but it apparently marked me as a layman to be surprised by this. ''The dialogue is pretty easy for me,'' he said. ''Everybody knows what the show is. We just don't know the exact words that are going to be spoken by the actors.''

In 1988, when ''Head of the Class'' was in its heyday, Schneider -- in his 20s by then, though still playing a high-school student -- was hired by a Nick development executive named Albie Hecht to be a co-host of Nick's second annual Kids' Choice Awards. He and Hecht stayed friends, and a couple of years later -- by which time ''Head of the Class'' had been canceled and Hecht had been made head of production for the network -- they got to talking about the idea of a sketch-comedy show. ''Basically it was 'Let's create our own ''Saturday Night Live'' for kids,' '' Schneider said. ''Or our own 'Laugh In,' or 'Your Show of Shows.' '' He wrote a pilot episode, and the series, titled ''All That,'' ran for 10 years -- an eternity in light of the havoc time wreaks on any show cast entirely with children.